The third Oscar nominee for Best Documentary that I am going to look at leading up to the Academy Awards is War/Dance. The film follows a group of schoolchildren from a refugee camp in northern Uganda to a national music competition. The children are victims of a 20-year civil war that has cost tens of thousands of lives in northern Uganda.

Many were abducted from their villages in the middle of the night by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that turned kidnapped boys as young as 5 into soldiers and girls into sexual slaves. Many were snatched in front of their parents, and some were forced at gunpoint to beat and kill family members and neighbors.

The movie focuses on three children from the Patongo camp who make the long journey to Kampala in 2005 in trucks guarded by security forces: Rose, a 13-year-old choir singer who witnessed her parents’ murder by the rebels; Nancy, a 14-year-old dancer who took charge of her three younger siblings after her father’s killing and her mother’s abduction; and Dominic, a 14-year-old former child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose passion is playing the xylophone. [The New York Times]

Andrea Nix and Sean Fine’s film has won awards at the Sundance, Woodstock and Aspen film festivals and is receiving praise for it’s striking visuals, although Stephen Holden at the New York Times wonders if the beautiful images soften the serious issues at hand in Uganda. Watch the trailer below and judge for yourself.

Want to help the folks like the kids in the movie? and get involved with the African Medical and Research Foundation. You can learn more about them in the video below as well.